Freedom for Mars – The Story of The Red Planet (the full title of this unofficial mission pack for Chaser) is the episodic modification of my own production. It’s a package of several independent addons connected by the story, which will be unregularly released for download. The aim of this modification is to extend the game step by step with new missions and to compensate the fact that the official sequel/prequel is still not in sight. At the end these packages would bring a lot of hours of fun and remarkable experience.

There have been a few weeks from the last development information of Chaser: Freedom for Mars so it’s high time to present more info. This time we will look into the process of the game enviroment developement. You can see several stages of development of depot (which you visit during the game) on four new screenshots.

There have been a few weeks from the last development information of Chaser: Freedom for Mars so it’s high time to present more info. This time we will look into the process of the game enviroment developement. You can see several stages of development of depot (which you visit during the game) on four new screenshots.

Screenshot 1:

On the first screenshot you can see rough construction of hall consisting of already textured brushes. As you can see there are no details yet and technical components of the map are missing too. Creation of all the places in modification starts from the scratch. At first there is an idea, then realization in simplified form and at the end necessary modifications, textures creation, details adding, optimalization and final improvements.

Screenshot 2:

On the second screenshot there is preparation of lightning and related entities such as light sources and coronas. There are already all the lights rendered in order to have better picture and to correct all the lightning irregularities. In Chaser there is still used old way of rendering so it’s necessary to compute lightning after each change in the scene in order the enhancements to be visible. Nevertheless the whole area already got its proposed visual style. Correct lightning (combination of lightning sources and shadows) is always very important because thanks to it every scene looks more real and perfect atmosphear is created.

Screenshot 3:

On the third screenshot there can be seen final adjustments, mainly adding bigger and lesser details needed to proper behavior of map, sounds placement, enemies, scripts etc. You can also see special pink eyes linked together. These entities combined with the portals divide map into separated cells. These cells always provide only rendering of areas you’re just located in and you can see at that moment. That’s the reason levels in Chaser can be huge with no impact on rendering performance during the game.

Screenshot 4:

The fourth picture represents the creation of the scene in the last stage, during game testing. It’s in fact the final stage of the scene. In the game you will see it exactly in the same form. Despite the fact that Chaser is an old game with no support of new graphical effects its visual is still pretty charming. You’re welcome to judge, I’ll appreciate all the reactions and comments.